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Wednesday, January 27, 2010

There is a new version of Diver out, with a few new features which should make reverse engineering easier in Eclipse. A couple of highlights are the new "Notes" feature which can be accessed using Eclipse's Properties View, and the new Trace Search Page which helps you to find things in your traces. Diver is also a lot smaller in terms of its memory footprint now. For more information on what's new, check out the New To Diver 0.1.0 Page. To get Diver, just point your P2 "Available Software Sites" to https://diver.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/diver/Release. Diver works on Windows and Linux.

Friday, January 22, 2010

Reverse engineering tools have traditionally suffered from a tremendous lack of adoption. There are likely several reasons for this. One is that they tend to come out of academia, and they never really get past the prototype stage. That is a shame because a lot of the ideas that have been proposed are really good ones. Another reason that they aren't often adopted is because it can be difficult to understand how to use them. The tools can be very cumbersome or they aren't very well documented.

I've tried to overcome both of these issues with Diver so that people will be able to see its use and it can be widely adopted. I have to say, my motivations aren't entirely altruistic: I do have to get my thesis done :-).

I've written a lot of in-depth documentation for Diver. But, let's be honest, I'm not even interested in reading all of those pages of documentation. So, for those of us with a shorter attention span, I've published several tutorial videos to get you started.

By the way, I made these tutorials using Wink. I highly recommend it for anyone who has to make a tutorial of their software. It's very easy to use and it gives you pretty well all the features that you could ask for. I searched for free screen capture software for a long while. This is the best that I could come by. If you've got any other suggestions, let me know.

Thursday, January 21, 2010

Though I'm really a coder at heart, I am a researcher by day. I've been working hard on the Diver project to try and figure out ways that reverse engineering can be used to aid coders like you and me. If you've downloaded it and used it, please fill out my survey.

If you haven't tried Diver yet, please try it. I'm really hopeful that it can help you Java developers out.

About Me

I've been a researcher and developer of Eclipse technologies for seven years. I am currently doing masters work at the University of Victoria, studying how IDEs can be improved to support reverse engineering.